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Auditor deserves heroism award

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Saturday March 8, 2014 5:12 AM

An award for Columbus City Schools Internal Auditor Carolyn Smith is well-deserved for the
professionalism and courage she showed as she tried to get to the bottom of allegations that
district administrators had rigged student data to fraudulently enhance the school system’s
performance ranking.

The Taxpayer Hero Award that Ohio Auditor Dave Yost gave Smith recently is a concrete
acknowledgment of the critical role she played in bringing serious wrongdoing to light.

Smith, who began looking into former employees’ allegations of data manipulation as soon as she
learned of them, faced stiff headwinds. Tina Abdella, a predecessor who originated the probe, was
suspended and eventually resigned when board members and former Superintendent Gene Harris tried to
sideline it.

After Smith revived the probe, she, too, was pressured, both by Harris and by former Board of
Education President Carol Perkins, to drop it. She persisted and, after Yost’s office began its
probe, she became, in his words, “a valuable ally” to the state investigation.

Being any sort of auditor requires a thick skin and the courage of one’s convictions; the job is
all about finding and pointing out the flaws in how other people are doing their jobs. For an
internal auditor, it’s even harder, because the subjects of scrutiny are one’s co-workers and,
sometimes, one’s boss.

Smith recognized that she serves school-district taxpayers, not the institution. For that, she
deserves the public’s thanks.

Witness in IRS probe should clear the air

Former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner again invoked her Fifth Amendment right to
avoid incriminating herself on Wednesday when called before the House Oversight Committee about her
agency’s targeting of conservative groups applying for nonprofit status ahead of the 2012 election.
As it did in May, when she did the same thing, Lerner’s move raised the obvious question: What does
she have to hide?

After all, President Barack Obama confidently proclaimed last month in an interview with Fox
News’ Bill O’Reilly that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the way the IRS acted in
holding up and denying hundreds of groups’ requests for 501(c)(4) status. Lerner herself had it all
neatly explained back in May, when she and other high-ranking agency officials staged a public
admission that conservative groups had been improperly targeted and blamed the targeting on “rogue
agents” in the Cincinnati IRS office.

The deeper investigators have dug, though, the more the targeting of conservative groups
appeared tied to a partisan agenda originating in Washington. This deserves to be fully vetted and
made public, but officials and their defenders in Congress and elsewhere have kept pushing to drop
the subject and move on.

Nothing would quash the controversy more quickly than complete disclosure. If there is nothing
to hide, Lerner and her colleagues should be happy to have all the facts brought out to clear their
names and uphold Americans’ confidence in their government.